Accounting for forest condition in Europe based on an international statistical standard.

Covering 35% of Europe's land area, forest ecosystems play a crucial role in safeguarding biodiversity and mitigating climate change. Yet, forest degradation continues to undermine key ecosystem services that forests deliver to society. Here we provide a spatially explicit assessment of the condition of forest ecosystems in Europe following a United Nations global statistical standard on ecosystem accounting, adopted in March 2021. We measure forest condition on a scale from 0 to 1, where 0 represents a degraded ecosystem and 1 represents a reference condition based on primary or protected forests. We show that the condition across 44 forest types averaged 0.566 in 2000 and increased to 0.585 in 2018. Forest productivity and connectivity are comparable to levels observed in undisturbed or least disturbed forests. One third of the forest area was subject to declining condition, signalled by a reduction in soil organic carbon, tree cover density and species richness of threatened birds. Our findings suggest that forest ecosystems will need further restoration, improvements in management and an extended period of recovery to approach natural conditions.

Model ensembles of ecosystem services fill global certainty and capacity gaps.

Sustaining ecosystem services (ES) critical to human well-being is hindered by many practitioners lacking access to ES models ("the capacity gap") or knowledge of the accuracy of available models ("the certainty gap"), especially in the world's poorer regions. We developed ensembles of multiple models at an unprecedented global scale for five ES of high policy relevance. Ensembles were 2 to 14% more accurate than individual models. Ensemble accuracy was not correlated with proxies for research capacity, indicating that accuracy is distributed equitably across the globe and that countries less able to research ES suffer no accuracy penalty. By making these ES ensembles and associated accuracy estimates freely available, we provide globally consistent ES information that can support policy and decision-making in regions with low data availability or low capacity for implementing complex ES models. Thus, we hope to reduce the capacity and certainty gaps impeding local- to global-scale movement toward ES sustainability.

Development of a bioeconomy monitoring framework for the European Union: An integrative and collaborative approach.

The EU Bioeconomy Strategy, updated in 2018, in its Action Plan pledges an EU-wide, internationally coherent monitoring system to track economic, environmental and social progress towards a sustainable bioeconomy. This paper presents the approach taken by the European Commission's (EC) Joint Research Centre (JRC) to develop such a system. To accomplish this, we capitalise on (1) the experiences of existing indicator frameworks; (2) stakeholder knowledge and expectations; and (3) national experiences and expertise. This approach is taken to ensure coherence with other bioeconomy-related European monitoring frameworks, the usefulness for decision-making and consistency with national and international initiatives to monitor the bioeconomy. We develop a conceptual framework, based on the definition of a sustainable bioeconomy as stated in the Strategy, for a holistic analysis of the trends in the bioeconomy sectors, following the three pillars of sustainability (economy, society and environment). From this conceptual framework, we derive an implementation framework that aims to highlight the synergies and trade-offs across the five objectives of the Bioeconomy Strategy in a coherent way. The EU Bioeconomy Monitoring System will be publicly available on the web platform of the EC Knowledge Centre for Bioeconomy.